| Startup Highlight: UnimaTheranos may have fell short of the promise for cheap diagnostics, but there | | | | | March 25 - Issue #6 Curated by R. Scott Munro, the latest news and information about startups and innovations in healthcare. |
| Startup Highlight: UnimaTheranos may have fell short of the promise for cheap diagnostics, but there may be a potentially cheaper, more mobile option: paper strips from Unima. This company was in the Winter batch for Y-Combinator, and has a paper strip that can test for various diseases. The tests are limited today, but they are ready in 15 minutes and cost $20 each. This may not be the CVS-Integrated clinic model with a fancy app that Theranos was going, but the population health ramifications of a low-cost, quick diagnostic tool are pretty far reaching. You can see the entire list of YC Companies from this batch (including a number of pretty cool healthcare startups), here. As always, if you come across news, announcements, videos, or podcasts that you think the other 4,600+ subscribers would benefit from, e-mail me at scott.munro@startupdigestmail.com or tweet @R_Scott_Munro and subscribe to the digest, here.
I have also started putting up updates and article overviews throughout the week, you can find those at: www.healthtechdigest.com/
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| | | | Transforming Community Health through Systemic Design medium.com Most everyone is trying to understand how clinicians transition from fee-for-service to fee-for-outcome in their actual day-to-day lives. Not just being told to do so, but actually doing so. This is an amazingly detailed story about how Mayo Clinic used design thinking to transform a number of rural clinics and how they thought about patient care. The focus to ensure all providers were operating “at the top of their licensure,” the move towards working with patients to understand their desired outcomes (and matching care to fit that), and the change towards a care team vs. an individual care provider, all seem to have been incredibly successful in Dodge and Mower Counties, and Mayo Clinic more broadly.What I liked about this article was that it wasn’t just fluff about “design thinking” it actually showed the process take place, and the actual outcomes of the implemented changes. Certainly a must read. | | Precision Behavioral Interventions, Based On Revealed Preferences, Key To Population Health www.forbes.com David Shaywitz has a great piece that sumarizes some take aways from a panel he moderated at mHealth Connect at Stanford. The interesting point here is that behavioral health interventions (specifically in the mHealth arena) are not one size fits all, and, counterintuitively, we as patients are pretty bad at guessing which type of intervention will be best for us. Instead we need to determine “revealed preferences” and not those preferences that a patient actually says. David goes onto say this may lead us into the murky waters of “doctor knows best” medicine, which may fly in the face of the “empowered patient” movement. I don’t see this as a bad thing, to be honest. In Being Mortal, Dr. Atul Gawande mentions three “approaches” to patient engagement as a physician: The first type is the paternalistic, “doctor knows best” type, the second, is more focused on empowering the patient to guide their own care (termed the “informative” approach), the third is a more consultative, and is termed the “interpretive” approach. This final approach sees the patient and the doctor as a team, and the doctor as trying to unearth the patients true desires, and helping them to realize those desires. It seems to me that David shouldn’t be scared about “revealed preferences,” so long as doctors are taking the interpretive approach to finding them. | | Disease-specific drug pricing could help tie cost to value www.statnews.com Pricing drugs and therapeutics is no easy business, in some cases you’re asking someone to determine how much a life should be worth. In today’s world, we know far more about how effective a particular drug will be on a particular person based on their genetic profile, so why don’t we start pricing accordingly? The more effective for a particular indication (and I’m sure eventually a particular person), the more expensive. STAT has a great article going over some of the various ways this pricing model is gaining traction. There are obvious moral implications for this model, and in the end the savings would likely get pocketed by the wrong stakeholders. But I like this as a thought experiment. | | Microsoft's Xbox Kinect breathes new life into respiratory assessment phys.org From VR to “brain-games”, it seems as though there are plenty of ways in which traditional “gaming” technologies are being used in the context of healthcare. The latest in the trend is using an Xbox Kinect to create a 3D model of a patients chest as they breath for a respiratory assessment. Pretty cool application of a novel technology. | | Millennials open to pharma ads, but pharma not delivering on UX econsultancy.com I would have thought that direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising in pharma was (and should) be on the downswing. According to MM&M’s latest report, pharma/medtech/biotech firms are focusing slightly less on DTC; however, Makovsky and Kelton did a survey of Millenials, and it seems that this cohort actually is far more likely to engage with digital pharma advertising than older generations. Maybe pharma shouldn’t discount DTC altogether with the advent of the digital natives… | | | | “While the U.S. health care system is shifting from fee for service to total cost of care, this is a very slow change. Right now, primary health care providers are being asked to do one thing while they're still getting paid to do another. This means leadership at all levels is required to create the space for innovation.”- Alex Ryan, Systemic Designer, Government of Alberta | | | | R. Scott Munro - Utility Infielder @ DocMatter www.startupdigest.com I am a classical languages nerd turned digital health geek. I spend my days researching medical device, pharmaceutical, and biotech companies + helping clinicians efficiently collaborate. I have a passion for the intersection of health and technology, and wholeheartedly believe we are at the beginning of the most exciting eras of healthcare. |
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